REFLECTIONS IN A CHINESE EYE

China to boost basic medical care in quake-hit zone: official

Medical staff of a medical team feed a baby with milk in a bottle in the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Yushu, northwest China's Qinghai Province, April 18, 2010. Medical staff of the medical team sent by Garze County of southwest China's Sichuan Province took the responsibility to take care of a newborn as the baby's parents were severely injured during the fatal earthquake that struck here on early Wednesday. (Xinhua/He Junchang)

BEIJING, April 23 (Xinhua) -- While continuing to treat those injured in the quake, China's health authorities plan to boost basic medical services in quake-hit northwest China's Qinghai Province.

"Now we will move from emergency medical treatment to basic health care services for the local people," said Liang Wannian, head of the ministry's emergency office at a press conference here.

Since the quake, most medical workers in the quake zone have been surgeons and nurses for intensive care. Over the past eight days, they performed 544 emergency surgical operations.

"More physicians, gynecologists and pediatricians will be dispatched to the region, especially those with expertise in treating diseases of high incidence in the region," he said.

Read more at XINHUA

Government Bidding for Biosite's Triage Products Suspended in China

SHANGHAI, April 20, 2010 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ ----On April 1, 2010, Haihong Medical Device Bidding Co., the largest government purchase bidding company for medical devices in China, suspended all government bidding for Biosite's Triage products pending the resolution of the lawsuit between Chinmax Medical Systems, Inc. and Inverness Medical Beijing Co. Ltd. (IMB), a subsidiary of Inverness Medical Innovations, Inc. (NYSE: IMA).

Public hospitals in many regions of China can only purchase Triage products through the on-line bidding system operated by Haihong, and the Haihong system was one of the most important distribution channels for Triage products in China. Chinmax had been properly listed as the proper maintenance company for Triage products on the Haihong system for the past 8 years.

Read more at FOX Business

High early puberty rates in China alarm doctors

BEIJING, April 20 -- Children in China's main cities are reaching puberty too early - a condition known as sexual precocity - and at a much higher rate than those in Western countries.

A Beijing doctor, who runs the city's first sexual precocity clinic, said her research into the condition showed that in Shanghai, the rate was as high as 1 percent.

"That is amazing because the rate in most Western countries is between 0.02 and 0.01 percent," said Kong Yuanyuan, whose clinic is at the Beijing Maternal and Child Healthcare Hospital.

"There is no accurate data for Beijing but I think it will be similar to Shanghai."

Kong said an increase in estrogen intake by children, especially girls, might be the main cause.

Read more at XINHUA

Solo in the key of Autism

Fingers of disabled girl become her connection with outside world

CHENGDU - The heavy rain wasn't going to keep them away.

Ding Ziyin (left), a 16-year-old girl suff ering from autism, plays the piano with her mother Lan Li sitting by. [China Daily] 

Despite the stormy night, nearly 400 people packed into the Jinsha Theater in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, ready for one special performer who was about to capture their imagination.

Meeting Ding Ziyin for the first time, people may think the 16-year-old girl is as healthy, lively and beautiful as her peers.

So not surprisingly, they're taken aback to learn she suffers from autism, a disorder that impairs a person's ability to communicate with others.

But when she sits before a piano that barrier falls away, and the fingers of the young girl - who cannot read music - become her connection with the outside world.

Born into an intellectual's family, Ding could recite over 100 poems from the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) at the age of 2. But her mother, Lan Li, discovered something wrong with her daughter after she started kindergarten.

"She was hyperactive and didn't respond when people called her. I thought something was wrong with her hearing and took her to a hospital for a check-up," Lan said.

Read more at China Daily

Chinese doctor pioneers height surgery in Shanghai

SHANGHAI — Orthopaedic surgeon Bai Helong hikes up his trousers, places his foot on his desk and marks the spot just below his hairless knee where he cuts into the legs of patients who want to be taller.

Over the past 15 years, Bai has given the gift of height to about 3,000 patients aged 14 to 55 -- Chinese, Americans, Germans, Japanese -- about half of whom went through with surgery simply because they did not like being short.

"I'm something of an authority in this field," explains Bai, who uses a technique he developed himself at a modest private clinic in the suburbs of Shanghai.

He saws through both the tibia and the fibula below the knee -- "without touching the bone marrow", he says -- to "make the dream come true" of those who say they suffer psychologically from being short.

One week later, the bones begin to regenerate. Heavy braces made of nickel and titanium, each weighing about half a kilo (one pound), are screwed into the inner part of the patient's legs.

Read more at Google News

Death toll from contagious disease in China doubles

BEIJING — Forty children in China died from the highly contagious hand, foot and mouth disease in March, almost doubling the death toll in the previous two months, state media reported.

The disease, which is especially harmful to young children, also infected over 77,750 people last month, prompting calls to boost efforts to control the spread of the illness in China, the official Xinhua news agency said.

"Spring and summer are a peak period for infectious diseases," Vice Premier Li Keqiang was quoted as saying.

"Preventing and controlling various infectious diseases such as the hand, foot and mouth disease is a key task."

In January and February this year, 17 people died of the disease and a further 61,429 were infected, according to official figures. By way of comparison, 353 were killed last year by the illness.

An outbreak of the disease has been reported in provinces and regions in south, central, north and eastern China, the report said late Friday.

The illness, which is common in China, causes fever, blister-like eruptions in the mouth and skin rashes. It can be fatal in children because their immune systems are immature.

GOOGLE News

Government and Policy New system to boost number of organ donors

Beijing: Chinese donors can now pledge their organs for use in life-saving transplants in parts of the country where nearly 99 out of 100 patients die because of a shortage in organ donations, Vice-Health Minister Huang Jiefu said.

The system will be expanded nationwide in the coming years, Huang said.

Earlier, people could also donate their bodies after death but only for research purposes.

Under the new system, donors can go to local branches of the Red Cross Society of China to sign documents to donate organs. Death-row inmates and living donors are ineligible to pledge their organs.

Read more at China Daily

Police Probe Death at China Drug Rehabilitation Center

Police in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region are probing the death of a man during his coercive abstention from drugs, sources from the local public security bureau said early Wednesday.

Zhang Wuqi, 43, died at a hospital in Hechi City at around 3 a.m. Tuesday, the city's public security bureau said in a press release.

"Policemen on patrol at the drug rehabilitation center in Hechi found Zhang was ill, and sent him to hospital," it said without elaborating.

It said Zhang was a native of Hechi.

The city's public security bureau has launched an investigation.

Lack of medical staff and facilities has long been a problem at Chinese drug rehabilitation centers, as well as jails and detention houses.

In January, China's ministries of public security and health ordered these institutions to improve medical care for detainees, convicts and others in custody.

The ministries said in a notice that these institutions should have in-house nurses and doctors, and practitioner pharmacists if possible. Those with insufficient in-house doctors should seek assistance from hospitals.

Detention facilities are also required to establish medical records for those in custody and hold consultations on major medical cases.

CRIENGLISH

Ministry links vaccines to sickness in 3 kids in northern China

BEIJING, Apr. 6, 2010 (Kyodo News International) -- The Chinese Health Ministry said Tuesday investigations into a vaccination scandal in northern China's Shanxi Province show vaccines are linked to the illness of three children, state media reported.

The ministry launched a probe last month into alleged problematic vaccines after a series of reports by a Chinese newspaper alleged four children had died in the province and at least 74 others were sickened after receiving vaccinations for encephalitis, hepatitis B and rabies between 2006 and 2008.

Ministry spokesperson Deng Haihua told a press conference that out of 15 children it examined, two were confirmed to be suffering from adverse reactions caused by the vaccines, Xinhua News Agency reported.

Effects from vaccines on a third sick child cannot be ruled out, said Deng, while illnesses in the remaining 12 children are not related to vaccines.

Read more at iStockAnalysist

Are our best professionals fried?

BEIJING, April 6 -- Worrying figures of physical, mental illnesses among scientists and high-tech professionals need government attention

From depression, ulcers, migraines and insomnia, scores of China's scientists and high-tech professionals are feeling the pressure to succeed and gritting through tremendous ailments, illnesses and pain.

A recent survey by the China Association for Science and Technology on the health and fitness of a large number of professionals in China's science and technology fields shows that many are suffering from different kinds of chronic occupational diseases. For example, about 11.5 percent had some cardio-cerebral vascular illness, 10.6 percent had digestive ulcers, 8.4 percent had chronic fatigue syndrome, and 7.9 percent were suffering from anxiety. Migraines, diabetes and bronchial asthma were also wearing down on the professionals.

What this clearly shows is that there needs to be more attention paid to the physical and psychological conditions of these workers. It also highlights the fact that the excessive pressures they face is one of the main factors why there is widespread illness among the majority of China's science and technology workers.

According to the survey, overtime hours, such as in the evenings or on holidays, with some working more than 50 hours per week, is taking a toll.

Read more at Xinhua

Drug-resistant TB at record levels worldwide, the WHO says

An estimated 440,000 people had multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in 2008 and a third of them died as the new variant of the TB mycobacterium continues to spread, the World Health Organization said Thursday. Nearly half of the cases were in China and India, which have been hit hardest by the outbreak. But in some areas of the world, especially three provinces in Russia, more than one in every four cases of tuberculosis are  the result of the hard-to-treat strain, according to the report.

Worldwide, there were an estimated 9.4 million cases of TB and 1.8 million deaths, so the drug-resistant forms remain a relatively small problem. But experts fear that they will continue to spread, displacing the drug-susceptible strains and greatly complicating treatment and increasing its cost.

Complete article at The Los Angeles Times.

The worldwide war on baby girls

Technology, declining fertility and ancient prejudice are combining to unbalance societies

XINRAN XUE, a Chinese writer, describes visiting a peasant family in the Yimeng area of Shandong province. The wife was giving birth. “We had scarcely sat down in the kitchen”, she writes (see article), “when we heard a moan of pain from the bedroom next door…The cries from the inner room grew louder—and abruptly stopped. There was a low sob, and then a man’s gruff voice said accusingly: ‘Useless thing!’

“Suddenly, I thought I heard a slight movement in the slops pail behind me,” Miss Xinran remembers. “To my absolute horror, I saw a tiny foot poking out of the pail. The midwife must have dropped that tiny baby alive into the slops pail! I nearly threw myself at it, but the two policemen [who had accompanied me] held my shoulders in a firm grip. ‘Don’t move, you can’t save it, it’s too late.’

“‘But that’s...murder...and you’re the police!’ The little foot was still now. The policemen held on to me for a few more minutes. ‘Doing a baby girl is not a big thing around here,’ [an] older woman said comfortingly. ‘That’s a living child,’ I said in a shaking voice, pointing at the slops pail. ‘It’s not a child,’ she corrected me. ‘It’s a girl baby, and we can’t keep it. Around these parts, you can’t get by without a son. Girl babies don’t count.’”

In January 2010 the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) showed what can happen to a country when girl babies don’t count. Within ten years, the academy said, one in five young men would be unable to find a bride because of the dearth of young women—a figure unprecedented in a country at peace.

The number is based on the sexual discrepancy among people aged 19 and below. According to CASS, China in 2020 will have 30m-40m more men of this age than young women. For comparison, there are 23m boys below the age of 20 in Germany, France and Britain combined and around 40m American boys and young men. So within ten years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America, or almost twice that of Europe’s three largest countries, with little prospect of marriage, untethered to a home of their own and without the stake in society that marriage and children provide.

Gendercide—to borrow the title of a 1985 book by Mary Anne Warren—is often seen as an unintended consequence of China’s one-child policy, or as a product of poverty or ignorance. But that cannot be the whole story. The surplus of bachelors—called in China guanggun, or “bare branches”— seems to have accelerated between 1990 and 2005, in ways not obviously linked to the one-child policy, which was introduced in 1979. And, as is becoming clear, the war against baby girls is not confined to China.

Parts of India have sex ratios as skewed as anything in its northern neighbour. Other East Asian countries—South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan—have peculiarly high numbers of male births. So, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, have former communist countries in the Caucasus and the western Balkans. Even subsets of America’s population are following suit, though not the population as a whole.

The real cause, argues Nick Eberstadt, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC, is not any country’s particular policy but “the fateful collision between overweening son preference, the use of rapidly spreading prenatal sex-determination technology and declining fertility.” These are global trends. And the selective destruction of baby girls is global, too.

Boys are slightly more likely to die in infancy than girls. To compensate, more boys are born than girls so there will be equal numbers of young men and women at puberty. In all societies that record births, between 103 and 106 boys are normally born for every 100 girls. The ratio has been so stable over time that it appears to be the natural order of things.

That order has changed fundamentally in the past 25 years. In China the sex ratio for the generation born between 1985 and 1989 was 108, already just outside the natural range. For the generation born in 2000-04, it was 124 (ie, 124 boys were born in those years for every 100 girls). According to CASS the ratio today is 123 boys per 100 girls. These rates are biologically impossible without human intervention.

The national averages hide astonishing figures at the provincial level. According to an analysis of Chinese household data carried out in late 2005 and reported in the British Medical Journal*, only one region, Tibet, has a sex ratio within the bounds of nature. Fourteen provinces—mostly in the east and south—have sex ratios at birth of 120 and above, and three have unprecedented levels of more than 130. As CASS says, “the gender imbalance has been growing wider year after year.”

The BMJ study also casts light on one of the puzzles about China’s sexual imbalance. How far has it been exaggerated by the presumed practice of not reporting the birth of baby daughters in the hope of getting another shot at bearing a son? Not much, the authors think. If this explanation were correct, you would expect to find sex ratios falling precipitously as girls who had been hidden at birth start entering the official registers on attending school or the doctor. In fact, there is no such fall. The sex ratio of 15-year-olds in 2005 was not far from the sex ratio at birth in 1990. The implication is that sex-selective abortion, not under-registration of girls, accounts for the excess of boys.

View Article at the Economist.

Human bones could reveal truth of Japan's 'Unit 731' experiments

More than 60 years after the end of the Second World War, the name "Unit 731" still has the power to generate shock, revulsion and denial in Japan.

The Imperial Japanese Army's notorious medical research team carried out secret human experiments regarded as some of the worst war crimes in history.

Its scientists subjected more than 10,000 people per year to grotesque Josef Mengele-style torture in the name of science, including captured Russian soldiers and downed American aircrews.

View article at  The Telegraph.

Doctors of Depravity

After more than 60 years of silence, World War II's most enduring and horrible secret is being nudged into the light of day. One by one the participants, white-haired and mildmannered, line up to tell their dreadful stories before they die.

Akira Makino is a frail widower living near Osaka in Japan. His only unusual habit is to regularly visit an obscure little town in the southern Philippines, where he gives clothes to poor children and has set up war memorials.

Mr Makino was stationed there during the war. What he never told anybody, including his wife, was that during the four months before Japan's defeat in March 1945, he dissected ten Filipino prisoners of war, including two teenage girls. He cut out their livers, kidneys and wombs while they were still alive. Only when he cut open their hearts did they finally perish.

These barbaric acts were, he said this week, "educational", to improve his knowledge of anatomy. "We removed some of the organs and amputated legs and arms. Two of the victims were young women, 18 or 19 years old. I hesitate to say it but we opened up their wombs to show the younger soldiers. They knew very little about women - it was sex education."

Why did he do it? "It was the order of the emperor, and the emperor was a god. I had no choice. If I had disobeyed I would have been killed." But the vivisections were also a revenge on the "enemy" - Filipino tribespeople whom the Japanese suspected of spying for the Americans.

Mr Makino's prisoners seem to have been luckier than some: he anaesthetised them before cutting them up. But the secret government department which organised such experiments in Japanese-occupied China took delight in experimenting on their subjects while they were still alive.

View complete article at Mail Online.

Shiro Ishii

Country: Japan, China.

Kill tally: At least 3,000 killed in experiments at the Unit 731 biological weapons facility. Approximately 200,000 killed in field tests of biological weapons. Between 20,000 to 30,000 Chinese killed when plague-infected rats are released from Unit 731 at the end of the Second World War.

Background: The final collapse of the Chinese Imperial Government at the start of the 20th Century brings a 30-year period of instability to China during which the nationalist Guomindang (Nationalist Party), headed by Chiang Kai-shek, battle the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), headed by Mao Tse-Tung, for ultimate control.

Across the East China Sea, Japan becomes progressively more nationalistic and militaristic, seeing in China an opportunity to expand on territory occupied in Manchuria (now Dongbei Pingyuan, north of Korea) and Shandong Province (across the Yellow Sea from Korea) after the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) and during the First World War.

The Japanese military is steeped in the tradition of unquestioning loyalty to the emperor. Commands from superior officers are regarded as equivalent to commands from the emperor himself. Military leaders have direct access to the emperor and the authority to transmit his pronouncements directly to the troops. The emperor is considered divine and the seat of ultimate power.

View complete article at moreorless : heroes & killers of the 20th century

Unmasking Horror -- A special report.; Japan Confronting Gruesome War Atrocity

MORIOKA, Japan— He is a cheerful old farmer who jokes as he serves rice cakes made by his wife, and then he switches easily to explaining what it is like to cut open a 30-year-old man who is tied naked to a bed and dissect him alive, without anesthetic.

"The fellow knew that it was over for him, and so he didn't struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down," recalled the 72-year-old farmer, then a medical assistant in a Japanese Army unit in China in World War II. "But when I picked up the scalpel, that's when he began screaming.

"I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped. This was all in a day's work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time."

Finally the old man, who insisted on anonymity, explained the reason for the vivisection. The Chinese prisoner had been deliberately infected with the plague as part of a research project -- the full horror of which is only now emerging -- to develop plague bombs for use in World War II. After infecting him, the researchers decided to cut him open to see what the disease does to a man's inside. No anesthetic was used, he said, out of concern that it might have an effect on the results.

That research program was one of the great secrets of Japan during and after World War II: a vast project to develop weapons of biological warfare, including plague, anthrax, cholera and a dozen other pathogens. Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army conducted research by experimenting on humans and by "field testing" plague bombs by dropping them on Chinese cities to see whether they could start plague outbreaks. They could.

View Complete Article at The New York Times.

Boy develops fish scales at 14 months old

Baby Song suffers from the rare and severe condition Lamellar ichthyosis, where the whole body is peeling off like fish skin

This 14-month-old boy born without pores in his skin has baffled medics by developing fish scales.

Doctors believe Song Sheng, of Jinhu, eastern China, may be suffering from a rare genetic condition that means his body cannot cool itself.

Song Sheng - called fish boy by locals - began developing scales within days of his birth caused by his lack of pores.

Doctors say because he cannot sweat or lose heat through his skin, it peels away in fish-like scales.

Instead, his family controls his body temperature by laying him in baths of ice.

Song Dehui, his father, said: "He is in a lot of pain all the time and if we don't have enough ice he gets a fever."

But doctors have told the family there is still no known cure for the genetic condition, known as Lamellar ichthyosis.

"It can be treated but not cured so we are praying for a miracle or a folk medicine cure," his father said.

View article at the Telegraph.

Boy makes final effort to save mother from leukemia

Shao Shuai talks with his sick mother via videophone at the Daopei hospital in Beijing yesterday. Wang Jing

Son donates bone marrow to mom; family in need of money for surgery A 12-year-old boy from Jiangsu province is making a desperate bid to save the life of his sick mother, who is battling leukemia, by donating his bone marrow this morning.

"All I want is to have my mother to be healthy like before," Shao Shuai told METRO with tears welling in his eyes.

The pre-teen is a fixture at Daopei Hospital, where he cooks lunch and dinner each day to be taken into his mother's quarantine room.

After speaking with his mother softly via the phone link to her room yesterday, he said they have been encouraging each other as they prepare for the final battle in her bid to beat the disease.

A bone marrow transplant often requires a 100 percent compatible match, but none of his mother's siblings were a match.

Due to their blood ties, Shao Shuai's marrow is a 50 percent compatible match.

Wu Tong, the chief doctor in charge of the operation, told METRO yesterday that the hospital has had success with such a match and insisted they were not taking risks.

"This is the final option in saving the patient's life before she shows any sign of sequential organ failure," Wu said, adding that the transplant operation will not affect the marrow donor's health.

View Complete article at China Daily.

An American Doctor In China: What’s Different?

People often ask me, “is your medical practice different in China compared to the U.S.?” Finally, after working in China for three years, I can now answer you with a definitive yes — and no. And sometimes Y…

OK, What’s Different?

#1 Difference: Chinese patient expectations - Last week I had another of many similar encounters: a young Chinese woman came in with typical common cold symptoms of runny nose and cough, and otherwise was fine. She made it very clear, very quickly, that she expected me to give her not just antibiotics, but IV antibiotics. Even after I explained to her that she only had a virus, she was quite flustered and still asked for the IV, telling me “you are very different than a local hospital”. Ahhhhh, yes indeed…

It is indeed true that we expat clinics are different than local hospitals. It’s common knowledge that Chinese hospitals have a startlingly high rate of antibiotic use, especially IV therapies, for viral illnesses that do not need antibiotics — like the common cold. It’s called “perverse incentives”: since deregulation in the 1980’s most Chinese hospitals rely on the revenue from prescriptions and procedures to pay their pills. So, Chinese patients are used to IV antibiotics for their colds; now, many newly-wealthy Chinese walk into a super-expensive expat clinic — and they only get over-the-counter meds and not even prescription antibiotics? You see the dilemma here.

Fortunately, with a lot of explanation and education — which they usually do not get from their 3-minute interaction with their local doctor — most patients will understand. And many also realize that their luxurious 15-20 minutes with the expat doctor, plus the organized appointment times and mellow waiting rooms, often make the extra expense worth it.

View Complete Article at My Health Beijing.

China's autism parents walk lonely road for help

An autistic child reacts during a therapy session at the Stars and Rain School for autistic children in Beijing.

Photograph by: Jason Lee, Reuters

BEIJING (Reuters) - When Li Mingqiu was two, his parents noticed that he had lost the ability to speak, didn't respond to his name, and was fixated by television commercials.

Even though the hospital gave him a clean bill of health, his mother was convinced there was something wrong. After exhaustive research on the Internet, she came up with the answer: autism.

For decades, autism went largely undiagnosed in China even as in the West awareness was growing of the condition. China only recognized autism as a disability in 2006.

"Autism is very unknown in China. If you ask people on the street, 90 percent of them have never heard of it," said Tian Huiping, the founder of China's pioneering school for autism, Stars and Rain, in the suburbs of Beijing.

View article at LP.

Health for the Masses: China's 'Barefoot Doctors'

When doctors and money are in short in supply, how does a government provide health care for its people? Brenda Wilson has reported that at a time when they're needed most, physicians and nurses from developing countries are being recruited away in large numbers by Western countries. This shortage -- for example, one doctor for every 10,000 people in Kenya -- is complicating the fight against AIDS and other diseases.

On the eve of the 1949 Communist Revolution, China found itself in a situation similar to that faced by African countries today. China had estimated that there were about 40,000 physicians trained in Western and Soviet medicine in the country, serving a population of 540 million people. Worse yet, most of these physicians worked in large cities; 80 percent of the population were rural peasants.

'Big Belly' and the Communist Party

Ten million of these peasants suffered from "big belly" -- the peasant name for schistosomiasis. The disease is caused by a worm living in snails found in swamps and rivers. Peasants catch the parasite while wading in water; once inside the body, the worm mates in blood vessels, and released eggs travel throughout the body, particularly to the intestines, bladder and liver. It's the body's immune reaction that causes the disease's symptoms, such as seizures and the characteristic swollen belly. Chronic cases risk permanent damage to organs such as the liver, intestines and lungs.

View complete article at NPR.

In China, shift to privatized healthcare brings long lines and frustration

For one Inner Mongolian woman and her ailing father, merely obtaining appointments for treatment at Beijing's most prestigious hospital becomes a weeklong, round-the-clock ordeal.

Reporting from Beijing - The frigid morning was still blanketed in darkness, but Nie Xiaojuan was awake and holding tightly her place in line. She had just spent her fifth straight night sleeping on the floor of Beijing Union College Hospital's registration hall, which was minutes away from its 6:30 a.m. opening.

Appointments for the best doctors are normally snapped up before sunrise. Lines begin forming in front of the hospital's six registration counters at least a day in advance. Nie's father, who was too weak to join the queue, needed to see several specialists. Nie had no choice but to stake out a place night after night so that each morning she could arrange a single appointment.

Around her hundreds of patients and family members filled the hall, a dimly lighted space about the size of a tennis court. Each evening it turns into a campsite. A woman from a coal town seeking an appointment with a liver specialist dozed on a pile of jackets. A janitor sat on a copy of the Beijing News, holding a place for his cousin with kidney problems. Many in line passed the time by playing cards, knitting or dozing. When people needed to use the toilet or run to buy food across the street, neighbors in line held their place.

View complete article at The Los Angeles Times.

China's mystery HIV-like disease may be all in the mind

Hundreds of people in China believe they might have a new disease with HIV-like symptoms, but doctors suggest their illness could be the result of a mental rather than a physical condition.

The Chinese authorities have been accused of covering up respiratory illnesses like Sars in the past.

This time doctors are blaming a breakdown in trust between the medical profession and patients, who fear they are being lied to when their diagnostic tests come back negative.

One man convinced he has the condition insisted on meeting in an empty motel room. He tries to avoid public places to reduce the chances of transmission.

He wears a face mask - he suspects his virus is spread by close contact, through sweat or saliva. He thinks he caught it after he had sex with a female prostitute.

But he is not HIV positive - seven HIV tests have come back negative.

View complete article at the BBC.

China brews superbugs

CHINA'S reckless use of antibiotics in its health system and agricultural production is fuelling an explosion of drug-resistant superbugs that threaten global health.

Scientists have warned that Chinese doctors routinely prescribe multiple doses of antibiotics for sore throats, while farmers' excessive dependence on the drugs has tainted the food chain.

Read article at The Sydney Morning Herald.

Survey: Half of China's moms-to-be have C-sections

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) - Nearly half of all births in China are delivered by cesarean section, the world's highest rate according to a survey by the World Health Organization, which warned Tuesday that a boom in unnecessary surgeries is jeopardizing women's health.

Rates of C-sections have reached "epidemic proportions" in many countries worldwide, the WHO said in a report focusing on Asia. In China, 46 percent of births reviewed in a survey of hospital records were C-sections; a quarter of those were not medically necessary, the report said.

"So many pregnant women ask for a cesarean birth in China, but we always suggest that they have a natural birth," said Dr. He Yuanhua, at Capital Antai Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital in Beijing, who did not participate in the study. "It's bad to have so many cesarean births because natural birth is the ideal way."

The WHO reviewed nearly 110,000 births in nine Asian countries in 2007-08. About 27 percent of births surveyed in the region were done under the knife, partially motivated by hospitals eager to make more money.

The survey, published online Tuesday in the medical journal Lancet, mirrors similar results reported by WHO in 2005 from Latin America, where 35 percent of pregnant women surveyed were delivering by C-section.

"The relative safety of the operation leads people to think it's as safe as vaginal birth," said Dr. A. Metin Gulmezoglu, from the WHO in Geneva who co-authored the Asia report. "That's unlikely to be the case."

Finish Article at WBOC16